Saturday, 12 August 2017

Dithering

A while back @dittanym destashed some curtain/upholstery fabric samples on facebook and I was lucky enough to get them. The fantastic thing about free fabric is it allows you to try out things that you might not have otherwise had the chance to, because although I know I am very fortunate, fabric is very expensive on the whole, and the dread fear of wasting it is often quite off-putting.

Anyway, having this fabric was quite liberating and I thought I would chop and sew and see what happened. It was also fun having the constraint of working with pieces of a fixed size - on average, they were about 8x12 inches.

I didn't measure anything, though halfway through the quilt it did occur to me that it would have been at least useful to work in multiples of a particular measurement in order to actually get blocks to fit together! I did some cutting down to fit and didn't worry about the results, moving things around and discarding things that didn't work like the acid yellow pieces.

I've never tried Pojagi but will have to give it a go as I am getting increasingly interested in the effect of quilts against the light. I discovered when making this quilt that nasty cheap polyester batting allows the light to shine through beautifully.

It's now awaiting some decisions on quilting - half of me wants to try out some really major perle stitching, but the other half doesn't want anything to get in the way of the shapes and the beautiful chambray colours of the fabric.

Bear with me because the following story is relevant. A while back when one of my children was very small and learning about the Egyptians she got very keen on the idea of embalming. This prompted her to suggest that she could embalm her goldfish. When we pointed out that she was fond of the goldfish and perhaps we shouldn't hurry it off its mortal coil she said hopefully that perhaps she could get another goldfish that she didn't like as much!

Anyway, faced with dithering about how to quilt the project above I thought perhaps I could make another, sacrificial, quilt and have a go on that to test the effect. So I made this one.

It's made using the neutrals from the same sample book. I used to do a lot of etching and relief printing and I wanted to get that kind of effect which is a bit hard to capture in a photo.

It's only a tiny quilt but the problem is that like a sacrificial goldfish I've got to quite like this one too, and now I'm dithering about both of them.

9 comments:

They do both look lovely and I think they'd look very nice hanging as a pair - with or without quilting. The danger of quilting the one you least like, seems to me, that you might be encouraging your daughter to kill a goldfish...But, goldfish aside, maybe you could start with some perle stitching and reserve judgment about how major to go as it evolves. You certainly have a beautiful selection of quilting threads :)

Oh wow I love that mini quilts. It has given me lots of ideas! Yesterday I tried to sell some scraps at a boot fair, no takers so they came home.......... now I have seen your pretty quilt, would you mind if I had a go?

These are both so lovely Catherine, I can't imagine either of them being viewed as a sacrificial lamb! If you are going to see them as a pair how about reversing the quilting for the quilt, neutral on the colour and colour on the neutral?

I love the idea of a sacrificial quilt! I went on holidays once and my goldfish died. When I came home, he was awaiting burial in my favourite mug. My boyfriend (now husband) couldn't fathom how the goldfish was kept for me, and how we continued to use the mug. He was from a pet free, immaculately kept house! Your mini quilt has also given me an idea for a quilt I have to make

I love the idea of a sacrificial quilt, but both of these are too beautiful to be sacrificed. Sometimes when perle seems just too much for a project I try Sulky 30, or recently the Aurifil lana - they have lovely colours but are just a bit more subtle.

I love hearing from you and always try to reply - please forgive me if I occasionally forget! If you don't hear back do check you aren't a "No Reply Blogger", and look for a reply here in the Comments section.